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Tron: the arcade game

“Most people don’t know it, but the Tron videogame [ royalties] basically covered the cost of production – that’s a lot of quarters!” says Steven Lisberger. Released in 1981 by Disney Interactive Studios, the Tron arcade game was a coin-operated upright not dissimilar to the one played by Flynn in the movie. Its story drew from an original, early draft of the Tron script, in which Grid Bugs played a bigger role as creepy antagonists (they’re barely seen in Lisberger’s film) and, in a direct switch from the movie, players control the blue rather than yellow light cycles.

An estimated 10,000 cabinets were sold and the game had reportedly made more than $30m of revenue by 1983. Its success was a shock, particularly to the studio. “It was all new to Disney,” recalls Lisberger. “They found themselves number one in videogames, computer graphics, computer animation. Brand new industries. Not to mention they were now the oracle of the personal computer and the internet. But they didn’t know how to talk about that; no-one really did ’til Steve Jobs did it. The tens of millions they made in gaming was so unexpected it was never mentioned when Tron was discussed financially.”